Metaphors in the context of online health communication

This article is devoted to study of metaphors in online health communication. Health communication is a process of knowledge transfer and knowledge acquisition between status- and competence-unequal participants (a doctor and a patient), who verbalize their knowledge in different ways. For metaphor is one of the key ways of categorization and conceptualization of experience, it reflects an individual's knowledge about the world and his place in it. Hence, it can be assumed that participants with asymmetric levels of knowledge represent information about the same event by using different metaphors. Understanding of the mechanism of metaphorization helps to optimize communication between an expert and a non-expert. In this paper we present a review of studies concerning the cognitive theory of metaphor, metaphorical modeling, metaphor in discourse, peculiarities of professional communication, knowledge communication within medical discourse. Here is considered one of the types of metaphors - a direct metaphor, whose distinguishing feature is a direct reference to the source-domain in the text using marker words, which simplifies identification of this type of metaphor in discourse. Results of the study made it possible to implement metaphorical modeling and draw appropriate conclusions relating to the source-domain concepts usage.